Dishonest
by Sally Mn
Summary: Teal'c is having difficulty following Daniel's way of describing their 'wonderful time'...


_**Dishonest**_

_Having a wonderful time... _Teal'c read the tiny, cribbed script from over his friend's shoulder. It had only taken him a year to learn to decipher the 'demented sub-kindergarten scratchings' (O'Neill's words, it looked more like obscene alien pictographs to Teal'c) that DanielJackson called handwriting, but that was rather better than O'Neill, or indeed most of the base. At this moment, though, he was wondering if he had been mistaken in thinking he understood them. Or DanielJackson.

"That is dishonest."

Daniel turned a vague look on him, pushed his glasses up his nose with one hand and yelped slightly as it rubbed against the cuts and scratches there. He still looked somewhat like he'd fought a battle with a Chulakan wildworm. "What?"

"You have written an untruth. To Cassie." This was unthinkable to Teal'c, to lie to a child they both cared about, who trusted Daniel. _He_ trusted_ Daniel._ Who was lying. About something so trivial and unnecessary

Daniel blinked at him - somewhat blearily, as befitted someone zonked out on three different medications. "It's a postcard, Teal'c."

He turned it over and pointed at the luridly - almost indecently - bright and sparkly and tacky 'vacation paradise' vista, and pointed out as the grey, grimy and identically tacky view from their window. "People always lie on postcards, it's a tradition. A historical practice," he went on mildly. "After all, we're on - well, we're supposed to be on - vacation. Having," he paused, looking for the right word somewhere in his daunting vocabulary, "fun."

"That's the story, at any rate," Major Carter groaned from her prone position on Daniel's bed, from which - having found a position to lie which didn't hurt the sunburn in some rather unthinkable places - she had refused to move for 10 hours straight.

Teal'c glanced again at the... 'postcard'. _Aunty Sam spent nine hours taking in the sights and sounds in the sunshine. _'Aunty Sam' blamed O'Neill, of course, though Teal'c was reasonably sure that it had not been _the colonel's_ idea to combine business and pleasure in the form of covert surveillance while sunbaking in the nude, nor had it been _the colonel's_ idea to fall asleep doing so, nor was it going to be _the colonel's _job to explain it to the general.

O'Neill was going to have enough explaining of his own to do, what with the twisted ankle and 'gravel rash' in even more unthinkable places from chasing their suspected NID spy/artifact smuggler/New-Age- Adventure tourist around a abandoned theme park... and finally falling with him from a decaying 'Prehistoric' Big Dipper. Still, they'd got their man, and the suspected Mayan/goa'uld artifact he'd been attempting to abscond with.

_Uncle Jack had a fantastic time with the rides._ To be fair, Teal'c wasn't absolutely certain that was untrue. O'Neill seemed to have found battling in a decrepit 'Flintsones Funfair' amusement park so enthralling - what humans called 'a high' - that it took even stronger medication, _and_ Teal'c promising to go back for pictures of the 'battleground', to bring him down from. He was now blissfully snoring on the other bed, still filthy and battered and totally oblivious.

"Postcards are the most dishonest form of travel writing... well, with the exception of our last four, five -" Daniel went on.

"Nine," the muffled groan corrected - muffled by the pillow that Major Carter had pulled over the only part of her that she said didn't hurt. Much.

"Nine mission reports."

Teal'c conceded the point. "That is... different."

"True, they're for the military and no one expects to have to read them. Mine and Sam's anyway."

Teal'c conceded again. Even the general, as diligent as he was, had been daunted the third time he'd been presented with six three-inch-thick folders... from each of them. Teal'c had heard on the 'grapevine' - a most useful ritual - that most people used O'Neill's reports as something called 'crib notes', and he _knew_ that O'Neill used his own for the same.

"But postcards are different. Shorter." Daniel stared down at it, clearly wondering how to fit another three paragraphs on; with a sigh, he drew an arrow, flipped it over and scribbled more across the vaguely terrifying picture of their Paradise's main strip (not, thankfully, MajorCarter's strip). "And public, since it has to go through the post."

_We tried out some local culinary treats,_ Teal'c read with difficulty.

Well yes, they had. And his symbiote was still suffering - and making him suffer - the remnants of alien indigestion. O'Neill's suggestion that they recruit the chef from the Seesyde Stoppe as a weapon against the goa'uld had some merit.

...though perhaps _not _shards of the artifact smuggler's over-endowed fake terracotta God which Daniel had smashed when tripping over its endowment. Daniel insisted on collecting every last shard - both of the god and the sixteen little pseudo-Incan busts he had landed in - before allowing anyone to do something about the blood dripping from his myriad cuts, but Teal'c could not see a use for them except as an example of how ignorant goa'uld inscriptions were as comical as O'Neill's beloved 'Chinglish' websites.

And they still had to locate the original relics that their smuggler had hidden away to copy, somewhere in Mexico. _We are looking forward to a side-trip to a promising little place called Sierra Verde,_ Daniel had scribbled, ignoring the tart "We are?" from the bed.

"Cassie and Janet can hear all the gruesome details," Daniel said blithely, scratching at a smaller 'gruesomeness', "when we get home. That's also traditional."

"You will tell her and DoctorFrasier the truth then."

"No, _then_ we tell them the elaborated horror version." Daniel stared at the stamp in one hand and the card with absolutely no space for it in the other; with a shrug and a wince, he stuck it straight over the pictographs that, Teal'c suspected, were his _own _part in this. "With ample enhancement about Sam's nine hours above and beyond -"

"Daniel!" The pillow shot up and sailed at them with amazingly bad aim, and Teal'c instinctively caught it. "You dare -!"

"- And Jack sprawled on his backside in the rubble of the Rubble Rush."

"He will make you pay dearly if you mention that," Teal'c observed calmy.

"And we'll find a way to let _everyone_ know _you_ tripped over a god's -"

Daniel interrupted her hastily. "Janet will make you _both _pay if you... sully a little girl's mind with that."

"She's not that little, and both of us can take Janet Frasier."

There was a silence.

"Okay, we tell her you fell over the god's foot. Deal?"

Daniel thought about it. "Deal."

"More lies -?"

They both looked at him for a minute.

"More lies."

"After all, Teal'c, what _you _did when Junior was under the influence of the Seesyde Stoppe's Seeburger... are you sure that we want that to find its way back to _anyone _in Colorado?"

Teal'c thought about that, and O'Neill's joyous if unnecessarily graphic description of the events that followed the Seeburger. He inclined his head in regal, if slightly mortified, agreement. "More lies."

"You know what they say." Daniel sighed, and dropped the postcard with the rather more circumspect and even more dishonest one to 'George'. "there are _four_ kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies, statistics... and what I Did On My... Vacation."

**~oOo~**

(The quote that, err, inspired this was "the postcard: the shortest, most common and possibly the most dishonest form of travel writing!" )


End file.
